[March 09, 2001] "The Making of America II is a Digital Library Federation project to create a proposed digital library object standard by encoding defined descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, along with the primary content, inside a digital library object."

"The cornerstone of the MoA II effort an XML DTD that defines the digital object's elements and encoding. The project has also developed a relational database that allows a library to capture the metadata, a program that reads the database and automatically creates the XML encoded digital objects, a repository manager that provides distributed network access to the objects (via RMI) and a viewer that displays MoA II objects from the repository."

The MoA II DTD and Software: "The University of California at Berkeley's Library is producing a variety of tools to support the capture of administrative and structural metadata during the creation of digitized archival materials, the transmission of administrative and structural metadata regarding such materials, and the display of digitized materials to archive users. The core around which all of the tools revolve, of course, is the MoA II DTD itself, which is introduced with a tutorial and sample encoded document below. To facilitate the production and maintenance of MOA II XML objects, the UCB Library has developed both an MoA II database that can be used to gather the descriptive, administrative and structural metadata pertaining to the library's digitized archival materials, and a Java program that can query this database, and automatically generate MoA II DTD compliant XML objects. To enable library patrons to view the MoA II XML objects generated from the database, the Library has implemented an MoA II Viewer and Repository Manager."

A MOA2 digital object consists of four major sections: (1) Descriptive metadata. The descriptive metadata section may point to external descriptive metadata (such as a finding aid or MARC record) or it may itself contain embedded descriptive metadata, or both (2) File inventory. The file inventory section lists all of the files comprising all electronic versions of the archival object, with the files grouped together by version. (3) Administrative metadata.The administrative metadata section provides information regarding how the files were created and stored, intellectual property rights, and the source of the files. (4) Structural map. The structural map provides one or more hierarchical descriptions of the original archival object's structure (either logical or physical structure), and provides pointers from locations within those hierarchies to the files which comprise the various electronic versions..."

MOA2 Digital Object Document Type Definition Tutorial "The DTD provides a flexible mechanism for encoding the descriptive, administrative and structural metadata that describe the files comprising multiple electronic versions of an archival object and their relationships.. It also manages to encode this information in a relatively efficient format. This flexibility and efficiency does come at the cost of some complexity. However, it is anticipated that MOA2 XML documents will be primarily machine-generated, and machine-processed for display, so that complexity should be relatively well hidden from those producing documents, and users examining them." [cache]

[March 09, 2001] "A Workshop on the Making of America II DTD and Digital Object Encoding." By Alexander Egger (Universitätsbibliothek Graz, Austria). In METAe-news [Newsletter for the Metadata Engine Project] Number 1 (January 2001). ['Introductory text for the meeting to be held in February 2001 at New York University, USA., - Digital Library Federation A Workshop on the Making of America II DTD and Digital Object Encoding.'] "The Making of America II Testbed Project developed a well-documented set of metadata elements needed for digital object management. This metadata set achieved its technological expression through an XML document type definition, the MOA2 DTD. But the MOA2 DTD was only designed to allow for the encoding of a limited range of digital objects, including diaries, still images, ledgers, and letterpress books. The DTD also lacks adequate provisions for encoding of descriptive metadata, provides no support for audio, video, and other time dependent media, and provides only very minimal internal and external linking facilities. The workshop will extend the MOA2 DTD to allow it to support a wider range of digital library objects and operations... Despite its shortcomings, the MOA2 DTD represents a significant step towards developing both a standard set of data elements for describing and managing digital library objects, and a technological mechanism for expressing that information. This workshop will provide an opportunity to build on and extend the MOA2 DTD to allow it to support a wider range of digital library objects and operations, and to discuss what further steps might be taken to further develop and maintain the DTD in the future." Note: The Metadata Engine Project (with 14 institutional partners) is a 5th Framework Programme Project (Digital Heritage and Cultural Content) funded by the European Union. It focuses upon "systematic extraction of metadata from the layout as well as from structural and segmental elements of books simultaneously to the digitisation process...The objective of METAe will be to develop a software which is able to extract as much metadata as possible from the layout of a book and to transform it into XML structured text. In addition to the text METAe will generate Dublin Core metadata and the digital facsimile of the document... the METAe software is intended to be a mayor step towards the objective of facilitating the digitisation of books and journals in order to turn digitisation into a reliable and standard technology for preserving and accessing books and journals."

[October 29, 2001] "Descriptive Meta Data Strategy for TEI Headers: A University of Michigan Library Case Study." By Lynn Marko and Christina Powell (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). In OCLC Systems And Services Volume 17, Number 3 (2001), pages 117-120. ISSN: 1065-075X. "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard was developed for humanities scholars to encode textual documents for data interchange and analytic research. Its header segment contains rich tag sets, which can sufficiently support library cataloging practice with AACR2 rules and authority control. This article presents a strategy that is currently used by the Making of America (MoA) project for transferring complete MARC data created on the library's online system to the header of the TEI encoded documents. It also describes the cooperation for achieving this task between the Digital Library Production Services (DLPS) and Monograph Cataloging Division at the University of Michigan library." See with DLPS the University of Michigan Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) which "provides the foundation and the framework for educational and non-profit institutions to fully develop their digital library collections. The newest DLXS enhancement, XPAT, is a powerful, SGML-aware search engine, and an ultra-versatile tool for the development of digital libraries. XPAT provides excellent support for word and phrase searching, indexing of SGML elements and attributes, fast retrieval, and open systems integration... The XPAT engine is an XML/SGML-aware search engine that the University of Michigan has deployed with an extremely diverse set of digital library resources. XPAT is based on the search engine previously marketed by Open Text as OT5, and sometimes referred to as 'Pat' and 'Pat5.0.' Because of XPAT's origins and the extent to which it has been employed in University of Michigan digital library projects, we are confident about the search engine's reliability, its core functionality, and many aspects of its scalability. XPAT provides excellent support for word and phrase searching, indexing of XML and SGML elements and attributes, extremely fast retrieval, and open systems integration. For example, among the many collections that use XPAT is the 3 million page, 7Gb, 1.5 billion word Making of America collection. As part of the UM DLXS, the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service has launched a continuous development process in which we have added a number of features to XPAT. We have introduced support for valid and well-formed XML, Linux binaries, better error handling, and improved indexing performance for XML/SGML elements, attributes, and tags." Contact John Price-Wilkin."